POLITICS WRIT LARGE

By KARAL ANN MARLING; Karal Ann Marling, who teaches American Culture at the University of Minnesota, is the author of ''Wall-to-Wall America,'' about American murals of the 1930's.

Published: January 7, 1990

THE MEXICAN MURALITS IN THE UNITED STATES

By Laurence P. Hurlburt

Illustrated. 320 pp. Albuquerque:

University of New Mexico Press. $45.

The Mexican mural novement came to the Untied States in the form of a fresco full of gigantic figures oppressed, tormented and contorted - or so it seemed - by the sheer obscurity of the alien wall on which they found themselves. It was the spring of 1930. The painter was Jose Clemente Orozco. The wall loomed angrily over students grabbing a casual bite to eat in the dining hall at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. And the job was clearly small potatoes to any Mexican painter of Orozco's generation.

South of the border, what the artist George Biddle called ''the greatest national school of mural painting since the Renaissance'' had flourished in the 1920's under the combined influence of radical art and left-wing politics; Cubism and Communism. Under Government auspices, whole buildings became the painters' canvas and the people's art galleries. In a 1933 letter to his friend and former schoolmate Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging creation of a comparable program for American artists, Biddle noted that the Mexicans had worked ''at plumber's wages ... to express on the walls of the government buildings the social ideals of the Mexican Revolution.'' Orozco's tortured decor for the Pomona refectory thus raised the possibility of federal patrongage and public art among New Dealers bent on a mild social revolution of their own. By 1933, ''los tres grandes of the movement - Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros - had all claimed important wall in the United States. And the coming of the Mexicans would also introduce into the esthetic debate of the Depression years issues of taste and control that are still pertinent to the current controversy over the use of Federal grants to support shows of certain kinds of art.

Censorship of art destined for the public arena was one such issue. On May 9, 1933, Diego Rivera was orderd off his scaffold in Rockefeller Center's RCA Building. While his intrepid American followers snapped pictures with cameras concealed in their garters and painted leftist slogans (''Workers Unites!'') on the windows of the bastion of Yankee imperialism and unregenerate capitalism, the offending picture was first covered and then hacked off the wall. The reason for the sponsors' displeasure was a head of Lenin, prominently situated in the right foreground, uniting the workers of the world whose inherent virtue was made manifest by a gaggle of decadent, bridge-playing coupon-clippers in the opposite side of the picture.

As Laurance P. Hurlburt tells the story in ''The Mexican Muralists in the United States,'' the Rivera mural seems to have been a casualty of North American tidiness, poor communications and the artist's own ideological grandstanding. The developers of the building, attempting to rent sites to business concerns in the depths of the Depression, were as anoyed by Rivera's slow progress and the plaster droppings in the lobby as they were by Lenin (whom the buildings's architect, Raymond Hood, mistook for Trotsky in any case). The Rockefeller family, sypathetic to Rivera's style and well apprised of his icongraphic intentions, failed to make their enthusiasm sufficiently clear to the builders and, rather than fight for their hand-picked artist, bailed out on him in the end. Recounted in detail for the first time by Mr.Hurlburt, Nelson Rockefeller's subsequent attempts to sidestep responsibility for an act of wanton vandalism (since it had been painted on a false wall, the fresco could have been removed) read like a primer onthe art of political double talk.

The Rockefeller Center mural, censored by pickax, was the cause celebre of the period. Left on the wall for all to see, however, it is likely that the fresco would have subsided into obscruity under the weight of its own unfamiliar and un-American sympolism. The Mexicans came to the United States bearng a large repertory of motifs derived from their own national heritage, These included mythological, cosmological, religious and folk themes - which might have been of interest to some educated Americans, but which were hardly calculated to electrify the man in the street, running an errand in the RCA Building. The same can be said of the Mexican style of blocky, massive forms, confined to the walls they occupied as much by the ideology of oppression as by any spatial requirements, So, when one of the Mexicans went toe to toe with one the novice American muralists their notoriety had inspired, the home-grown product was likely to triumph on the grounds of sheer legilibilty . Orozco and Thomas Hart Benton both worked at New York's New School for Social Research in 1930 and 1931, for instance. Orozco's murals (still at their original site) are noteworthy mainly for ferocious heads of Lenin and Stalin. Benton's own (now in the lobby of the Equitable Building) are just as fresh and sprightly, just as all-American, optimistic, energetic and interesting to look at as they were in 1931.

With skill and patience, Mr. Hurlburt, who has worked for 10years on this book, does unravel the intended meaning of the Mexicans' American work and the baroque convolutions of party politics to which their art often alluded. He does not consider their American legacy in the same detail. On the one hand, thanks to Rivera, fearful federal art bureaucrats spent the 30's looking for heads of Lenin everywhere: Philip Guston, a one-time student of Siqueiros, had his mural in the Jacob Riss Community Center at the Queensbridge House in New York City scrutinized for disguised radicalism in 1938 because a puppy dog's tail crossed a child's leg in a pattern that suggested a hammer and sickle. But few hammers and sickles were ever found. On the other hand, Guston, Jackson Pollock and many other young artists who had worked with Siqueiros later gave up Lenin and symbolism altogether in favor of the formal lessons of the Mexican mural movement: overweening scale, new materials (like auto paints) and new techniques (dripping the paint). Out of the Mexican mural movement, they invented Abstract Expressionsim, America's first great national school.

''Pleasant Mother,'' an oil by David Alfaro Siqueiros, about 1930; ''The Soviet Union,'' a 1931 fresco by Jose Clemente Orozco. (Illustrations from ''The Mexican Muralists in the United States'')